Main menu

Tag Archives: STL

In this post I will show how to use VTK to trace rays emanating from the cell-centers of a source mesh, intersecting with another target mesh, and then show you how to cast subsequent rays bouncing off the target adhering to physics laws. This will include calculating the cell-centers in a mesh, calculating the normal vectors at those cells, vector visualization through glyphs, as well as other elements of visualization like textures and scene-lighting.

In this post I will demonstrate how to use VTK to perform ray-casting, i.e., intersecting lines/rays with surface meshes, and retrieving the coordinates of those intersection points. This will include loading such meshes from STL files, performing the intersections, as well as visualizing the mesh, lines, and points in VTK. In addition, I will present my very own pycaster package which cleanly wraps the VTK parts and allows for cleaner code and added functionality.

In this post I will demonstrate how to use VTK to read in a series of DICOM files from a CT examination and extract a mesh surface of the bone structures. I will then show you how to visualize the mesh with VTK and save it, the mesh that is, into an STL file.